How landcutters are still hurting the mainland

As an ex-camper, it provided a sense of fulfillment that I was doing something to earn a living in SL.


For some people it is their job. There is a connection between camping and job destruction. And it would probably hurt the SL economy if it went away.

I think you're trying to draw too close a parallel to the specific incident in the parable.

Reputation bonus.

No, I'm not kidding.

Not sure if everyone realises this but before the traffic gaming blog post there will be a post on landcutting. I don't have any details on what it will say though.

*Edit: I'm sure you'll all find some reason to complain about it though. "Waaah, there are too many blog posts, it clutters the blog and spams me with email alerts"

Alright. I keep seeing this in the forum. What did s/he do to get permanently banned from here?

I believe that this was a blinkered view.
It did not take into account that the purpose was simply to game search. THe purpose was to mislead people into thinking that the camping place was somehow more worthy of search ranking than it would have been without the camping.

So if I'm a driver..... It's my job. If I drive for a bank-robber, I'm only doing my job. If the police stop bank-robbing, they hurt the economy.
This would be for a gentle polite bank-robber, or perhaps a con-man. Naturally, I wouldn't agree to drive for a violent killer. That would be very wrong.

You may have noticed I've been making a concerted effort to hire "have-nots" in the past month or so. I think there's a great untapped newbie resource that people with large businesses can really take advantage of. I've had mixed success so far some times it works great other times not so much but I plan to continue it. The trick is to find small easy tasks that do nothing but consume time and require no skills. Probably every SL business owner has some that they can hire newbies for. I've got several more in mind that I just need to prepare for such as putting descriptions in parcels, photographing parcels, monitoring estates for covenant violations (ban lines, ugly builds, aggressive temp rezzers, whatever), advertising on more forums and so on. You can get people to do these jobs for pennies per day. It takes some imagination and it takes a fair amount of trust in the wisdom of the crowd but it really works.

For example, right now I have someone posting ads on SLX and this forum every single day for just L$50 per post per day. I don't want to say anything that might insult my hard working employees but let's be honest, I don't know what my time is worth but it sure as hell is worth more than US$0.20 for the 15 minutes or whatever it takes to make a classified on the forums. Plus, those guys are way more consistant about it than I ever would be. It's win-win-win!

So melodramatic.

There is more than one point of view here, obviously. Your view is just as blinkered.

As a new player, it gave a means of income that wasn't "cheating." I was under no illusions as to whether or not a place was popular once arriving there. I don't think I ever used popular places to find anything. I camped at some decent places, and as a business owner, I had advertised at places that used camping because I recognized that campers were also shoppers. At least until the bots came by. With the advent of anti-bot camping technology, however, it ensures that more real people are getting camping money, versus bots. And that's good for the economy, because it allows people to rent homes and buy a little bit of stuff.

These are great ideas!!

There is one tiny drawback perhaps.
They are real jobs, involving the expenditure of time and effort on the part of the employee.

This is totaly different to a 'job' that involves sitting an avatar on a camping pad and leaving the keyboard to do someting or sleep in RL.
I think that many who currently camp will not be at all interested in a real SL job.

I think you have no understanding of campers - not the bot farm campers, but people who sit behind the monitor and camp. They want jobs they can do, and a simple job like Elan's is something that I would have taken as a noob.

Yeah, well maybe. Although I think most campers would happily take L$50 for making one post on a forum obviously the point is that it is a mutually beneficial arrangement. I'm not interested in giving people money for nothing. Just giving out money for nearly nothing.

BTW one other thing I paid someone to do was L$75 per parcel to put out xstreet real estate listing boxes. It was awesome, the guy did a great job and it only took me probably five minutes of total effort to do 17 parcels instead of about 3 hours or whatever it would have taken me.

As a new player, I was cheated by people who ran camping spots.
Most of the searches I did were dominated by parcels that had cheated their way to the top rankings.
If I relied on Map to indicate where the hot spots were, my ability to do that was impaired by the dots that were campers.


And back on topic:

How about -
Land cutters are not cheating. They are only using the tools that LL gave them. Their actions are not against the TOS. LL obviously considers their activities to be acceptable because they have not prevented them.

I wouldn't accept that line of course. In the same way I don't accept those exact arguments from people who defend search gaming.

I agree.

I'd have loved a job like those Elan offers. I used to camp when I started SL, but in the sort of places where the chairs kick you and rearrange themselves every few minutes. Almost nobody was AFK because of this, and we had a blast. I think the one time I went AFK while camping for any length of time, I not only got kicked from the chair, but came back to find I had been "decorated" by my "friends", bless them.

Come on Sling, you know damn well the trade in camping. Genuine campers who go to a parcel that advertises camping are actually boosting traffic on a parcel that offers....ooh camping.



Don't be absurd. People being scammed aren't going to keep coming back for more, that's damaging to economy. Stop being such a drama Queen.





Of course there is, stop being such a negative Nancy. If people can find ways of paying L$ and getting something back in return then that's positive for the world as a whole.

Elan's jobs sound reasonable.
If more business people used their imagination, then there would be no justification for camping as a 'job'.

The camping environmant that you describe is 'the old days' I believe.
I've seen more than one post in this forum describing someone standing in the middle of a bunch of campers, offering a goodly bunch of L$, but getting absolutely no response.




Getting back nearly on topic:

Maybe landcutters could employ people to terraform their micro-parcels, and stand on them with a gross unpleasant appearance. Maybe they could carry irritating attachments. Nothing that could be interpreted as harassment of course - but just short of it.

Which you posted while I was readying to post:

Maybe landcutters could employ people to terraform their micro-parcels, and stand on them with a gross unpleasant appearance. Maybe they could carry irritating attachments. Nothing that could be interpreted as harassment of course - but just short of it.

The land cutters might achieve a faster sale.
THe employees would have L$ to spend in SL.
So good for the world as a whole?

Sadly true.



Hahaha that's very naughty. Don't give them ideas!

That camping environment still exists where people use campers with anti-bot technology.

Phil, it was before I was paying any attention to the Forums, so I honestly don't know. I suppose the archives give a hint, but perhaps someone who actually knows can answer you in a PM; inasmuch as the person is banned, it's hardly cricket to go into details here.
Details, please? I used to think that all reputation mechanisms are doomed, but I've been listening to Stack Overflow podcasts, and am now thinking that there may be hope. (On the other hand, they're somewhat protected by the OpenID hurdle, so... not sure anything can work where "let a hundred alts bloom" is the norm.)
Yep. There are lots of possibilities. Viral marketing comes to mind, and MTurk. It's all good.

Camping has some interesting features that make it "ideal":
1. It *really* takes no skill (so not only is it good for ultra-newbies, but it also requires no instructions from the camp operator and no "employee turnover" cost),
2. It is pretty much completely language neutral,
3. The capacity is easily adjusted by the camp operator, with straightforward means of adjusting payout to attract campers,
4. It assumes nothing about the camper's in-world schedule.
So that's why I'm drawn to the MTurk analogy: if one can formulate tasks in such a way that pretty much anybody can do them and at any time, it should be possible to automate distribution of the tasks.

Well, the original problem with the reputation bonus was that you could get more money out than you spent on giving people reps. I suggested a scheme that would prevent that back when the rep parties were still going on, but I forget the details. The important bit is that the benefit from a rep was (a) a publicly visible score, and (b) a little cash, but no more than you would get if someone gave you a tip instead of a rep.

Somehow people seemed willing to pay a few L$ to rep someone up, but not to just plain tip them.

BTW remember this from the beginning of the thread? I implemented a bot that went through every sim I own land in and IM'd all the other land owners to tell them about the parcels I had for sale nearby. It ran for a week or so but yesterday sadly it got suspended presumably for spam.

I'm pretty sure I'd screw up my first attempt to make such a thing well-behaved, accidentally IMing the same person more than once about land in different sims, or the same land on different days, or forgetting an "opt-out" option, or something silly. But assuming yours was better than mine would be, I'd have hoped it would be better received. I suppose it was sure to get AR'd (by a competitor, or wannabe, if nobody else), but it seems such a practical thing to do, for both the seller and prospective buyers. And best of all, buyers in the same sim, who'd have a natural interest in keeping the land intact.

It would be informative to appeal the suspension, to get clarification on just how LL would have it change to be in compliance.

This is what's truly awesome about the whole AR and suspension system. Trust me I've been sent warnings a number of times and every time I have to wildly speculate on what the reason might be. There's no way for me to know if I'm being suspended for a bug or suspended for the basic function of the bot.

I would just use the bot to gather information, not to IM the landowner. Just to be safe.

Hmm, I could pay newbies to send the IMs...